From award-winning author Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty is the story of the complex and singular woman behind one of the most fascinating museums in the nation and the world—a tale of beauty and loss, grit and American self-invention.

Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, with its plain exterior enfolding an astonishing four-story Italian palazzo, rose from Boston’s Fens at the turn of the twentieth century. Its treasures encompassed not only masterwork paintings but tapestries, rare books, prints, porcelains, and fine furniture.

An extraordinary achievement of storytelling and scholarship, Chasing Beauty illuminates the fascinating ways the museum and its holdings can be seen as a kind of memoir, dazzling and haunting, created with objects instead of words and displayed per Isabella’s wishes in the exact placements she initially curated.

Born in 1840 to a privileged New York family, Isabella Stewart married Boston Brahmin Jack Gardner as she turned twenty. She was misunderstood by Boston’s insular society and suffered the death of her only child, a beloved boy, not yet two years old.

But in time came friendships, glittering and bohemian; awe-inspiring world travels; and collecting beautiful things with a keen eye and competitive pace—all these were balm for loss. Henry James and John Singer Sargent—whose portrait of Isabella was a masterpiece and a scandal—came to recognize her originality. Bernard Berenson, leading connoisseur of the Italian Renaissance, was her art dealer.

Natalie Dykstra grew up in the Midwest, first near the shores of Lake Michigan, then in a suburb west of Chicago. She received her undergraduate degree in Classics followed by graduate degrees in American Studies at the University of Wyoming and the University of Kansas. She won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her work on Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life as well as grants from the Schlesinger Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she was elected an honorary fellow in 2011. She received a 2018 Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her forthcoming Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, to be published March 26, 2024 by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins. This work also has been supported by the inaugural 2018 Robert and Ina Caro Fellowship sponsored by the Biographers International Organization (BIO). She has served as a board member of BIO since 2020.

She is emerita professor of English and senior research professor at Hope College, where she taught writing, literature, and the arts for twenty years. She lives with her husband in Waltham, Massachusetts.